


On Names

by anenigmaticsmile



Series: Seventeen Years [2]
Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 14:11:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12583616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anenigmaticsmile/pseuds/anenigmaticsmile
Summary: Names are important.  This Natia knows.





	On Names

Natia Brosca names things.  She always has.

When she’s small – when she’s four – she names the nugs that live in the hole next to hers.  She calls them, in the broken dwarvish Dust Town speaks, Squeak and Snuffle, Twitch and Pinky.  During the long days she stays tucked away while Mother and Rica work the streets, begging for what little they can get, Natia watches her nug family.  She learns the rhythm of their lives, the way they snuggle into a big pile to sleep after Snuffle and Squeak come scurrying home with stolen grains to munch.  And she cries, this tiny child, when he ends up on her table, the day he scurries home just a little too late. 

“Naming things only brings bad luck,” says Mother, who has never named anything.

When she’s bigger – when she’s seven – Natia Brosca names herself.  There’s a little boy involved, with scraped knees and elbows and cheeks, who smiles too big and laughs too loud for the rough streets.  “I’m Leske,” he tells her through gapped teeth.  “What’s your name?” And he waits patiently as she scuffs a bare foot against the dirt and scrambles through her words.  Mother calls her _brat_ and Rica calls her _little sister_ , but neither feels like home in front of this little boy with nothing but a smile.

“Natia,” she says, turning the old word around and around in her mouth.  “I’m Natia.”

And she’s even bigger but feels even smaller when she’s ten and twelve and fifteen, smiling at Rica and Mother and Leske as she names herself _errand-boy_ instead of the _murderer_ that’s swirling in the back of her mind.  It’s a simple kind of happiness that comes now, too, as she leans on Leske with a boisterous _salroka_ and steps away from Mother with a whispered _Kalah_ as she passes the door.

“Names,” she tells Rica at night, tucked together in bed, “are important.”

So it comes as no surprise when she’s seventeen and scared, taken to the surface by a man called Duncan but named _leader_ , that she collects the names of the plants and the birds and the rivers they follow like precious coins.  And then she’s seventeen and lost with a little boy and a smaller girl and they don’t give up names as easily as Duncan would, but that almost makes the naming sweeter.

“We call that _isana_ ,” she says one quiet night, tucked around a fire as the witch prepares her tonics. “It sings.”

When she’s at her biggest – when she’s eighteen – and the world is newly saved, Natia Brosca sits down.  It takes three days and hurts like hell, but by the end of it she has all of their names across her back, curving around the lines of a rose that means more than the world.  Alistair and Leliana and Morrigan and Zevran and Wynne and Sten.  She knows that the little pocket of happiness they had managed to build will empty as they all go to their own destinies, but she hopes that maybe this will make them stay.

“Names have power,” she reminds as the world gives her more and more.  “Don’t waste them.”

And then she’s twenty-eight and the world is ending again, but this time it’s not hers to save.  But she’s brave and strong, even if she’s not very big, and she throws herself behind the world.  She writes letters.

“Names are chosen,” she starts, careful script painting the paper meant for the one who has to save them, this time.

Natia Brosca names things.  She always has.  It’s a way to call things _hers_.


End file.
